He worked with LinkedIn, Anthropic,Tinder, Coinbase..

Welcome to another Founder Wisdom pod. We have Eli Schwartz with us today. He's the author of Product-Led SEO. He's an AEO consultant. He's helped LinkedIn, Anthropic, Tinder, Coinbase, and 20+ great companies build organic revenue. Frankly, I've never seen someone with like such a great portfolio of clients. Pretty impressive.

Thank you.

And even in our first chat, I learned a lot from a couple of things you said, Eli. So welcome to the podcast. Tell us a bit more about yourself.

Great to be here. Thanks for having me. So I spent most of my career in-house and then about 8 years ago, I, you know, while I was in-house, I was working with companies on the side. I worked with great brands like Quora and Shutterstock and G2, Blue Nile, and I ended up earning more from my moonlighting than I was from the day job. So I decided to make the consulting thing a full-time job. And then the last almost 8 years, been able to work with some really amazing companies on helping them to build a strategy. And in our prep call here, we talked about messy problems. So I love big companies and how they don't agree on things, and that means that they don't really execute on strategy. So that's been my thing for the last bunch of years consulting, helping companies to build towards an organic strategy that helps them drive revenue. So yes, it was primarily SEO, but we've shifted into what I would still consider mostly SEO, but it now has that AEO and LLM flavor.

There you go. And you started on Wall Street at NYSE?

I was, I was, uh, just turned 18 and I wanted to make it on Wall Street because I watched a bunch of movies about getting rich on Wall Street. Didn't work out as intended, and, uh, here I am doing marketing.

Uh, what happened? There's a gap in your LinkedIn from 2001 to You were in biz dev roles. Like when did you officially started? School. Okay, school. Yeah. When did you officially started like freelancing for growth, for lack of a better term?

So I started doing full-time consulting in 2019, but I probably, the day I learned what SEO was, I started trying to moonlight and, you know, earn, you know, first it was $50 an hour and then it was like $100 an hour. And it moved up consistently. I'd say there's some clients I was probably able to charge them $5,000 an hour just for advice.

There you go. So Zendesk was the first big role, but Zendesk wasn't literally big at that time. It was an unknown company, same for Quora, but you got to work with these very fast-growing tech giants or to-be tech giants. What did you learn from these first experiences and when did you know that you were going to niche down into this type of ICP?

So I wrote a book called Product-Led SEO, which was really my approach to SEO. And what it came from was that while I was working at SurveyMonkey, I was freelancing long before I joined SurveyMonkey. My first role in digital marketing was working with affiliates, and that's where I learned SEO. And then again, like I said, as soon as I learned SEO, I immediately started trying to sell that service, and I was successful at selling that service on the side. Well, while I was at SurveyMonkey, there had been a time where I was talking to a potential client And this client was kind of a smartass and he said, so you're SEO, you're gonna gimme keywords? I'm like, yes. And then he's like, and you're gonna tell me what content to write? And I'm like, yes. And he's like, you're gonna tell me where to get links? I'm like, yes. He's like, well, why wouldn't I just hire someone from the Philippines? And I didn't have a good answer for that. Hmm. And I felt like I should have a good answer. I make a good 6-figure salary and I manage a team of 5 and I report to CMO. I am, I feel like I am better than someone you're gonna find on Upwork and Fiverr, but I couldn't articulate why. So I decided to articulate why, and that became my book, Product-Led SEO, which is really how you conceptualize and how you strategize. And one of the first stories I tell in my book, and I'm not here promoting my book, it's been out for 5 years, so if anyone wants to buy it or steal it, by all means. So one of the first things I tell in my book is about how I joined SurveyMonkey, and on my very first day, They had never had anyone responsible for SEO. And this is at the time a 12-year-old company had clients like every parliament in the entire world, every government in the entire everything. They had links in every, every big company in the entire world had used them. And I found some low-hanging fruit my very first day. And I went over to an engineering manager and I told him who I was and I was now responsible for SEO and I needed him to adjust something because we had something broken. And he literally spun his chair around away from me and said, marketing doesn't get to tell engineering what to do. And that was it. I was shut down. And I was like, I just left a startup and I'm in this big company and like I'm getting shut down on my very first day. And that was when I decided I had to figure out how to work within a big company. So at a startup and every company before that, and in many of my consulting roles, I identify a problem, I make a suggestion. And then someone picks up the ball and runs with it and they execute against it. In a big company, you know, it depends on the size of the company. And a lot of the consulting I've done of late, I identify a problem, I pass the ball onto someone and they say, this is fantastic. We're definitely gonna do this by Q4 of 2029. And, you know, at SurveyMonkey, I was never gonna get a bonus. I was never gonna get a promotion. I was never gonna lead a team unless I figured out how to get people to do stuff. And that's what my book is. And that's what my approach is. Everyone can come up with ideas for SEO. You can go into Claude and say, give me good SEO ideas for my website, build me a website, but you have to be able to execute against it by winning friends, by building strategies, by like earning political capital. And in some of the companies I've worked with, there's one company in my LinkedIn that you mentioned before that it took them 9 months to change 4 words in their title tag. Now Now, if I would tell an SEO person, I updated a title tag on this public company's website, they'd be like, for that? For that you got paid essentially 6 figures? Like, yes, because I had to be in a meeting every single week to discuss an update on that. I had to meet with the PR team. I had to meet with the legal team. I think I ended up meeting with the CEO. So there's a CEO of a public company for my 4 words in the title tag. And then I had to meet with international teams to make sure when it was translated into Polish, it wasn't going to break anything. So yes, took four words, but that was a marathon.

Okay, the obvious question is like how do you keep your sanity?

Oh, I get paid, so that helps me keep it. No, I'm just kidding. I happen to really like it.

Like not that's eighty percent of the answer.

Yeah, it I mean that's part of the role. So part of the role is being that person that can help shepherd things through. Sometimes I come into organizations and they know what the problems are and no one believes them. So then I come in as an outsider and I'm just like, hey, I'm an SEO expert, now an AEO expert, this is what you should do. And they're like, well, Eli said we should do it. And I give them plausible deniability, I give them air cover, and then they do it. So it— that's, that's why people bring a consultant in, because it helps them to do things that they know to be obvious. Not because I'm smarter than them, not because I even have more experience than them. I'm an outsider.

The second obvious question, right? Why not have agents do the follow-up by email so that you don't have to waste your sanity telling unaccountable, unaccountable humans to do things they probably won't do? And also, why not have agents to do the work for you, for them and for you so that you get paid more versus like just telling them what to do and then have gigantic success stories, right? I 100x Anthropic's traffic in 2 weeks.

So, uh, this is going to be sacrilegious for, you know, a growth podcast and an AI podcast and someone coming from Silicon Valley, but agents can't do this. So what I do is I'll get in on a Zoom call and we'll talk about travel and hobbies for 55 minutes, and the last 5 minutes I'm like, hey, Do you think you can ship that thing for me? So it's the relationships. Again, Claude will tell you, Claude can do great SEO. Claude can do 90% of your SEO ideas and give you a roadmap. It can give you all that, but it can't convince people to give their time to it. And the only— so you create an agent that emails them and nags them every day, they're just gonna block it out. What they're not gonna block out is a friend. They're not gonna block out someone that says, I've done this. There was an org where everyone hated each other. Product hated engineering, engineering hated marketing, sales hated everyone, and comms was like, no one wanted to talk to each other. And I got to be in the middle of this and make everyone find where they can agree and where they can help each other. So I got product to say, why do you hate marketing? And they told me, they're always like asking us to do stuff. And I got marketing to say, why do you hate product? And they're like, they never include us in the conversation. And I was able to make one semblance of peace between them. And marketing did something that they didn't want to do for product because they did it for me. And product did something that they didn't want to do for marketing because they did it for me. There's no way an agent can do that. I think it'll be a long time before agents can do that, unless it's an agent pretending to be nice and social.

And were you always gifted with these skills of being a diplomat? Because I'm not. a diplomat at all. And I don't know, I can unite people together, but ballers, right? Like very high performers with very high performers, because I'm a very high performer, but like idiots with like other idiots like that, I would never do that. So were you always gifted with that skill?

No, I don't even think I'm a diplomat. I think that I want to get my SEO roadmap done. And I just see these as the pieces I need to put into place to make it happen.

Got it. What if you keep the diplomat part and have agents execute on their behalf? Could that be done? Because you said that Claude Code and such agents can do 90% of the work, right? So why not implement that in 5x your prices?

Uh, I, I don't think that it would ever be possible. Like, at big companies, they specifically make sure that no one can get their job taken away. I, I love working in companies that have tens of thousands of people, and then like the second agents come in the door, they don't need tens of thousands So there, there may come a time and place where it's a 5-person company that earns a ton of revenue and they already have agents and I can get my agents to do it. But anything that's easily shipped, I'm talking like sometimes I work with teams and I have to help them build their roadmap. And we spend, uh, actually it's worse. I worked with a company where everything had to be presented in a Google Doc PRD and you had to like work hours on it. And I didn't do this cuz I was a consultant, but the people, my points of contact and the people I was supporting were doing all-nighters on these documents. They stressed over one word. Should this word be before that word? So if it was as easy as, let's get an agent to print out this PRD, they don't need any of those people. And they would go to meetings and then they would get yelled at for why point 1 was before point 2 and should have been the other way. So that's what they stressed over. So I think if they can get agents in the door, it solves a lot more problems, but agents aren't coming in their doors.

You're an insider in most of these fast-growing enterprises, plus you're touching AI. Do you feel the shape of corporations will stay as it is? Do you think they will keep on hiring humans and staying in these kinds of bullshit politics? 'Cause I tend to think that corporations will go through mass layoffs. And then guys like me, I can be, hey, if I achieve this KPI in your company, you give me X amount of shares and rev share and I'll make shitloads of money and then there will be a new life to corporations. What do you think about that?

Oh yeah, corporations are gonna stay the same way they are. I think in Silicon Valley we have this bubble and we just think about corporations like the ones we know, like let's say Anthropic is a corporation or OpenAI is a corporation, which has a lot less employees than Google. But I think as soon as you break outside that bubble, I was recently on a call with a bunch of pharmaceutical companies No, they represent billions of dollars in revenue. They touch billions of people's lives and they have people producing press releases and engaging with the FDA and the governments will always be governments. So those companies aren't going to change. I can't imagine that the big monopolists, again, I've talked to big e-commerce companies like Walmart and Target and Best Buy. They have physical stores. They will still function with bureaucratic corporations. Even a company like eBay, which doesn't have inventory. So Amazon's one story. Amazon is, I think, the largest employer in the world. Despite them being e-commerce, they will have lots of employees. eBay does not have physical inventory. eBay's still going to be a massive corporation for as long as they exist. Banks will be massive corporations for as long as they exist. People will always do things. They will always have these 40-hour-a-week jobs or 50-hour-a-week jobs, even though probably only 5 hours of their time is needed. But I don't see us shifting away that fast. Silicon Valley, maybe they could figure out a way But my own personal anecdote is just working with Anthropic, a company that's disrupting a lot of that, still needs a lot of people and absolutely still needed SEO.

Well, I mean, you work with a bunch of Silicon Valley companies, right? LinkedIn, Coinbase, Tinder, Scribd.

Tons of people.

Yeah, always have people. A bunch of them. But what if, okay, hear me on that. What if like these Silicon Valley is like winner take all? They're so efficient, they run on agents that, These other boys that work the same way before, if they don't change, if they don't start slashing jobs and using agents, they will just die out. Do you think that will force them to change? Also, what if I have the choice as a CEO? John in compliance, which has a 5% error rate, and agent compliance GPT that has a 0.00001% mistake rate, which— Wouldn't I choose the agent?

No, because John in compliance has a boss named Helen in compliance, and Helen in compliance only feels like she's doing a really good job if she has a bunch of people beneath her. So despite the fact that agents might be just as good, this is the way corporations and people work. What is not going to work like this is bootstrapped companies. So if you're paying out of your own pocket and you have to rationalize to yourself Why would I want to go and hire a person and have to pay benefits and do all this stuff? And when I can hire an agent, one interesting side note to all the AI and agents is that when you pay an employee, you have certain requirements that you have to do for that employee. So you have to pay their benefits, you have to pay them every two weeks, you have to file things for them. But when you have an agent or any AI, you get paid on a credit card. You can get payment terms. You get points for. You're paying an employee and earning back points. You don't have to file anything with the government. So I think that smaller companies, bootstrapped companies that the owners are very involved, will likely adopt AI a lot faster or move away from AI if it's not efficient. But bigger companies, despite AI being able to do their job, no one is really going to get patted on the head and raises because they figured out how to spend money less efficiently. They will say, I have a huge team. And they run AI agents, but you should respect me because I have a huge team.

That's intriguing. Yeah, I could certainly appreciate some points you made. What's your roster of clients right now? You run on what, like 5 clients a month or something like that?

I try to keep it less than 5 always.

Okay. Are you designing mostly for lifestyle? Are these— or is there like a scalability aspect of your business and eventually you could even exit?

I could exit the assets I have, so I could exit my book. I have a newsletter. I could exit that, but I don't want to ever exit my consulting. The way that I scale consulting is by essentially increasing pricing and increasing offerings. I would always— like, if I were to build an agency, and there have been times where I thought about an agency with humans, not AI agents, it would be me changing the job. I would no longer be working directly on problems. I'd be working with people helping people identify those problems. And I more like working directly in companies and it exposes me to more. So when I'm working with companies, I can be with AI-native companies and learn what they're doing, learn what's happening in the marketplace versus me running a company and just doing sales and operations.

And you get purely referrals for your new clients? You don't do any outbound?

No. The—

Or AEO? You get leads from AEO?

So, uh, it depends what you call AEO. I, if you do a search on any of the LLMs, it depends on the prompt, I will likely come up on some sort of list. So if you look for top 10 AEO people, depends on who you are, what it is, I may come up. But certainly if you do a search for the top 50, I'll always come up. And that's not something I've ever optimized for. It's really earned from all the things I've been doing for my entire career. So sometimes people tell me, oh, I found you on ChatGPT, I found you on Gemini, I found you on Claude. But most of it's a complete pyramid. So they found me on LinkedIn, they started reading my newsletter, they decided to buy the book, they checked out some podcasts I've been on. Hopefully they listen to this podcast. Then they decide that what they're hearing is potentially a better solution than the agency or the consultant they're working with. And then they reach out and then we have a conversation. So sometimes it's a referral, but even when it's a referral, The only way I'm ever going to close that client is if they go through that same journey where they read things I've written, they follow me on LinkedIn. No one's going to come cold and just pay me to work with them.

Yeah, for sure. Um, you're making good money. You've been making good money since quite some time. Aren't you bored nowadays? Like, what's next for you? What excites you?

Yeah, uh, definitely. And bored. Uh, when I find something more interesting to do, I would, but it's hard to get for a trade-off of like, you know, working with a company and having to spend time on just one problem when I can consult most of the time, I can consult for that company, earn the same as if I were a full-time employee and don't have to spend that amount of hours. So when I do find that company that's worth that 50 hours versus the 10 hours and worth the potentially same amount of money, I would totally jump to do that. I never intended on doing this for as long as I've been doing it.

Why don't you take stock in your—

I do.

Oh, I know.

I've totally taken stock. I have a decent portfolio of companies that are worthless.

Yeah, no, that's exciting, isn't it?

Now, a couple of companies are going to be worth something, but most of it's absolutely worthless. What I find is when founders want to give me stock, usually they don't value their own stock. When I have to pull it out of them, they value it. So the way it works is I'll ask for it and they'll be like, no, we'd rather pay you cash. And then my cash proposal will be too high for them to afford, and then they'll offer the stock. I

love that.

As long as it's hard to get it out of them, there's value. If they're instantly like, hey, can you work for stock or can you work on a CPA model? That's when I know that there's no upside.

I love it. What's their price ceiling? Because first getting an SEO guy like you in their company is almost impossible because that doesn't exist in the job market. You have like too much experience. You told me like 15 grand a month, but even that is not big money for Anthropic. It's like, it's small-ass money. I mean, they pay their engineer, their AI researcher tens of millions per year. So even these guys have a ceiling. And what is that ceiling normally that you see in tech companies from Silicon Valley?

So most companies aren't stupid. They would value the Very, very hard for companies to believe what that ROI is gonna be at the outset. So there's a client, they paid me, you know, multiple 6 figures over the time I worked with them, and they're now generating $4 to $8 million per month off the SEO I built for them. And when I say I built SEO, so my approach is building products around SEO, and this is a product I built. It did not exist before I ideated it, did not exist before I built it. So you're the creator of the product? implemented it and optimized it and oversaw it. So it was all net new. So this product itself drives $4 to $8 million per month in the last 4 years that I haven't even been working with them. So if I would've come in at the outset and say, hey, this is your investment, you're now going to make $50 million over the next few years, they wouldn't have believed me. But the companies that do believe that if something is built as a product and I can ideate that and I can implement it, and make it happen, yeah, there is no ceiling.

Got it. Okay, so you start, you evaluate the client, you do some math in the backend, how much, uh, my work could bring, you quote them a price, maybe they say yes to this price, eventually it's probably too much for them, and then you're like, hey, why don't you pay me stock instead? Is that the normal funnel?

No, the normal funnel is they stumble upon me in whatever way they found me, I give them a price. They typically either say it's too high, too low, or whatever it is, and then they circle back and they talk to all those other people they find in the list, and then they're looking for the perfect fit. That's the difference between engineering and SEO and AEO marketing. There is only one. You're only looking for one person. It's not like you can have multiple engineering consultants or your multiple engineering teams. They're looking for someone to help them bring them to some— somewhere special. Now, What I have found, and I've been doing this for 8 years, obviously I have lost way more deals, significantly more deals than I've ever gained. Now, most of these clients I stay in touch with. So I find out when— so they'll say, oh, we decided to go a different direction, and I'll watch them. And then the VP that hired them will leave, that hired that person will leave, and then someone else will find me in their Slack, in their tickets, in their docs. And they come back and they say, hey, we saw we talked to you, can we talk again? So I always try to maintain that relationship because there is a very small pool of people that can help companies like this.

Right. I'm trying to figure out also like really how you cracked the enterprise code, right? Was it just putting Zendesk and Quora on your website and then G2? And after that, like it was a waterfall because everyone recognizes all these 3 companies? and then you get that much more and you get all the Silicon Valley giants and you're the de facto SEO guy. Is that how it works? And it was hard to crack the tree first. Is that the—

No, totally. It's total coincidence. So I'll give you what happened. I was working at SurveyMonkey and a colleague of mine was a partner at Y Combinator. So he introduced me to some YC companies very, very long time ago, very early YC companies. That's how I met Scribd, met a bunch of other companies, worked with great companies there. That's the referral started. Not all those companies were big brands. Then I was invited onto the YC podcast, and this was in 2017. Anybody wants, it's still up and you can check it out. Same podcast Elon Musk was on, and I don't have nearly as many views as he has. I was on that podcast. I didn't realize how big of an impact that podcast had. The day that podcast came out, my LinkedIn blew up, and a bunch of those big companies came off of that. Oh, that's good. Then there's just the principle of social proof. So once I could say I worked with Shutterstock, Getty Images wanted to talk, and Getty Images is, I think, dead as of today. So all these other companies came in, and that's— and when you say AI agents are going to disrupt humans, we should never discount all this human emotion. People buy off of social proof. So I can't tell you how many companies have come to me, and they were not even any of the other companies I consulted with. They respect SurveyMonkey as the brand. They're like, oh, you worked for SurveyMonkey. You must know what you're doing when all of the work I did there was completely irrelevant. So that's how I cracked enterprise by working in an enterprise. And while I was at SurveyMonkey, I did all the same things other SEO consultants did. I wrote on the SEO blogs, interviewed on the SEO podcast, spoke at the SEO conferences, but working in an enterprise is what changed things. That enterprise lent its credibility to me and then people hired me because of that. And then one leads to another. And I would say, you know, again, I've talked to some fantastic companies that I'll probably never close, and that's fine because I have a bunch of other ones. Like, working for Anthropic is a great brand, but even if I hadn't worked with Anthropic, I worked with LinkedIn, I worked with Tinder, I worked with Coinbase. Each of those leads to something else and in different spaces. So because I worked with Insight Timer, I've had an opportunity to talk to Calm and Headspace. Everyone always wants to work with someone that has been in their space.

Very valuable, dude. Very valuable. Um, my brain is though, it's like, how can we scale that, right? But you said you only take 5 clients a week. Why not launch a SaaS or something? Uh,

no, I can't do it the same price. No one would pay the same prices for that.

Yeah, no, no, for sure. But do you, do you have like scalability plans? My question, I keep coming back to that because I know that people want your shit. You have like the best portfolio. Why not scale this to like $15 million a year and then $50 and then $100? Like, is there a scalability band there?

If I could get someone that would be able to work with companies and they would trust that it's the same as working with me. So I have a couple of people that I do that with, but not as an agency because they— that always becomes my differentiator. They go to— and the people I work with and compete with are always the same. No scalability, not agents, they're not agencies. So when a company goes to an agency, they get the model, they get pitched by the person that founded the agency, and then they discover they're gonna be working with an account manager. They're looking for one consultant, they're looking for someone with deep expertise to work with them. That fights against scalability. The only way I can really scale my own business is with price.

And agents.

And I may know agents make me more efficient. But I wouldn't deploy the agents on the client because they're looking for the opposite. They're looking for the human.

But they wouldn't even know. Like, my—

Yeah, I do.

Humans nowadays, that's how good they are.

Oh, totally. Yeah. I mean, I'll have agents nag people. Did you forget to pay me? Did you— did this ship? I can— that's easy to do.

Yeah. Or just in a personalized way, right? Like, hey, did you enter this code snippet here? Did you change this meta tag? Like, hey, this If we do this, then you can expect that tomorrow. Dude, thanks for blowing your mind today. I've got lots of value from that because I'm seeking to get in enterprise myself, right? I have some resistance, which we've talked about, but I think you've laid down a no-bullshit path, like, to get into enterprise that can be reproduced. So thanks so much for that. Where can people—

If I could just give one thing is when I was looking for jobs early in my career, A sales guy from I think he worked at one of these big like hardware companies. I can't remember who was. The advice he gave me is he said your first job should be at an enterprise because everyone always wants to understand enterprises. So if you work in an enterprise, you realize how bad they are. And I didn't take his advice because I wanted to go to startup and get rich and didn't work out like that. But I later ended up working in SurveyMonkey, which became an enterprise, and that is how I'm able to sell to enterprises. Because I sat in that seat. I sat in that seat where they think about money and they think about execution in the most ridiculous way. I would say one of my best consulting clients, I negotiated on price and they ended up giving in. And after working with them for a year, the VP told me, he said, you know, you gave me the proposal and I didn't wanna pay what you asked because that's what I'm trained to do. I'm trained to just ask for a discount. But then I thought about it. No one's ever gonna give me credit for saving this public company a few thousand dollars per month. So he is like, you should just know that I could have asked you for less. And of course I had to save my own ego and I'm like, I wouldn't have agreed, but thanks for sharing that.

Oh man. Fucking love it, dude. Where can people find out more about you, Ilyas?

So check out my Substack at productledseo.com. Obviously read my book and, and find me on LinkedIn.

It was Ilyas and Charles for another episode of